Burned Out on Healing:
Spiritual Gaslighting and Burnout Therapy
You've tried everything. Therapy, self-help books, meditation, prayer, manifestation, astrology, affirmations, wellness retreats, groups, endless self-reflection. Some of it genuinely grew you as a person. None of it changed the actual situation you're in.
And somewhere along the way, you were probably told the same thing by more than one of these paths: try harder. Believe more. Hope more. Do the work more completely. So you did. Now you're exhausted by the healing itself, the circumstance is still here, and you're wondering if the problem was never your effort at all.
You May Be a Good Fit for This Work If
You're tired of hustling for spiritual worth.
You're tired of prayers, chants, affirmations, and manifestation.
You're tired of self-improvement that never ends, and of being told to believe harder and hope more.
You're ready to be in reality, and to let go of religions, faiths, and spiritual practices that gaslight us into blaming ourselves when they don't deliver.
The Surface: Forced Positivity
The most visible layer of this is easy to spot. Therapist Whitney Goodman's book Toxic Positivity names it well: a culture with no real room for difficult feelings, only pressure to look on the bright side. If "everything happens for a reason" or "just think positive" has left you feeling more alone, you're not imagining it.
Underneath: Hope as Another Way of Not Being Here
Underneath forced positivity is something quieter, and it's often called spiritual gaslighting: being told, directly or by implication, that your pain is a lack of faith, gratitude, or effort. Many spiritual and religious paths, and plenty of the wellness, self-help, and even therapy world too, locate the solution entirely inside you: change your mindset, deepen your faith, do the work more sincerely, and your circumstances will follow. Psychologists call this a belief in internal locus of control. When it gets applied to something genuinely outside your control, and it doesn't work, it doesn't just disappoint. It feels like hope itself betrayed you.
In my graduate research I explored the difference between real hope and wishful thinking, which can feel identical from the inside. Wishful thinking is hope that's quietly avoiding reality: a diagnosis, a difficult circumstance, harm that's already been done, because looking directly at it is too painful.
Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön goes further, and her view is one I find clarifying. In When Things Fall Apart, she describes hope and fear as two sides of one coin. Hope keeps us reaching for a better version of this moment, or a better version of ourselves, so we never quite land where we are. She calls giving up that kind of hope "the beginning of the beginning."
This is not despair, and it is not a philosophy to adopt. It's an invitation to stop performing, stop striving to be someone more enlightened than you are, and find out what's true when you stop.
This Isn't About Giving Up
To be direct: this is not about suicidality. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, that is a different and serious concern that needs to be named and addressed directly, not folded into this conversation. What I'm describing is something else: letting go of the exhausting effort to hope, believe, and perform your way out of reality, so that you can actually be in it.
Grief Without a Fix
Sometimes the most honest thing available isn't a new practice, a better mindset, or even meaning-making. It's grief: sitting with what has been lost, what may or may not be regained, changed, or salvaged, without needing to solve it first. Even the instinct to find meaning in what happened can become its own version of avoidance if it's reached for too quickly.
Psychologist Pauline Boss's concept of ambiguous loss describes something close to this: grief that has no clear resolution and no closure to arrive at, which is its own kind of loss worth naming. This isn't about staying stuck. It's about no longer needing the story to resolve neatly before you're allowed to grieve it.
As a clinician, I'll say honestly: this is hard to sit with, for you and for me. It is deeply human to want to fix pain, yours and my own discomfort watching it. Part of what I offer is staying present with you in that difficulty, rather than rushing either of us toward a resolution that isn't actually available yet.
How I Can Help
This work asks you to tell the difference between grounded hope and wishful thinking, to grieve honestly rather than perform positivity you don't feel, and to take an honest look at which beliefs and practices have served you and which have been quietly costing you. It's slow, and it doesn't offer a new framework to master. You can read more about how I approach this work.
This isn't about talking you out of your beliefs, your faith, or your hope. You get to keep what is genuinely yours. It's about making sure it is actually yours, grounded in what's real, not a performance you're exhausted from maintaining.
If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please reach out for immediate support: call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7.
Ready to Talk?
If this resonates with you, I'd love to talk. Contact me to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.